A Tent in the Wilderness

I’m so excited to be back at the Rock & Sling blog! Today I’m writing about wilderness and a simple faith.

I live in a world where people pitch tents all time. I see them in their tents every day on Facebook, blogs, and Twitter. They stake their claim on a spot of land and defend it vigorously. Sometimes I put up a tent, too, on top of a tall soapbox from which I rant and rave. The problem is that for every tent up on a mountainside, there’s a tent in the valley, claiming that its place is better.

It’s getting harder and harder to see where I am. I was so busy setting up camp next to the right people and right opinions that I missed the doe and her fawn sneaking through the brush. I was so focused on defending my territory that I ignored the star-rise in the twilight sky. The air was laced with fall bonfire smoke, and I might have pulled up a chair to warm myself, but I was perfecting the inside of my tent instead.

The Christian faith has been reduced to argument, to fact and certainty, to proofs and defenses. I can’t wade through it all anymore. We’ve tried to contain God inside all of our human semantics and projections, but he is too big for that. I long to sense him away from all the theologizing and theorizing. I want to know him simply, naturally, without fuss and pomp. Perhaps finding him is easier than we make it out to be.